Stephen Toulmin The revival of casuistry what was the revival of casuistry? By reviving casuistry (also known as case ethics), Toulmin sought to find the middle ground between the extremes of absolutism and relativism. what were some of his beliefs about this? Casuistry employs absolutist principles, called "type cases" or "paradigm cases," without resorting to absolutism. can you tell me more about these "cases"? It uses the standard principles (for example, sanctity of life) as referential markers in moral arguments. An individual case is then compared and contrasted with the type case. what else is interesting about casuistry? Casuistry was practiced widely during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to resolve moral issues.
How did Toulmin relate this to moral issues?
How did Toulmin relate casuistry to moral issues?
By reviving casuistry (also known as case ethics), Toulmin sought to find the middle ground between the extremes of absolutism and relativism. Casuistry was practiced widely during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to resolve moral issues. Although casuistry largely fell silent during the modern period, in The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1988), Toulmin collaborated with Albert R. Jonsen to demonstrate the effectiveness of casuistry in practical argumentation during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, effectively reviving it as a permissible method of argument.  Casuistry employs absolutist principles, called "type cases" or "paradigm cases," without resorting to absolutism. It uses the standard principles (for example, sanctity of life) as referential markers in moral arguments. An individual case is then compared and contrasted with the type case. Given an individual case that is completely identical to the type case, moral judgments can be made immediately using the standard moral principles advocated in the type case. If the individual case differs from the type case, the differences will be critically assessed in order to arrive at a rational claim.  Through the procedure of casuistry, Toulmin and Jonsen identified three problematic situations in moral reasoning: first, the type case fits the individual case only ambiguously; second, two type cases apply to the same individual case in conflicting ways; third, an unprecedented individual case occurs, which cannot be compared or contrasted to any type case. Through the use of casuistry, Toulmin demonstrated and reinforced his previous emphasis on the significance of comparison to moral arguments, a significance not addressed in theories of absolutism or relativism. CANNOTANSWER
Through the procedure of casuistry, Toulmin and Jonsen identified three problematic situations in moral reasoning:
Stephen Edelston Toulmin (; 25 March 1922 – 4 December 2009) was a British philosopher, author, and educator. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Toulmin devoted his works to the analysis of moral reasoning. Throughout his writings, he sought to develop practical arguments which can be used effectively in evaluating the ethics behind moral issues. His works were later found useful in the field of rhetoric for analyzing rhetorical arguments. The Toulmin model of argumentation, a diagram containing six interrelated components used for analyzing arguments, and published in his 1958 book The Uses of Argument, was considered his most influential work, particularly in the field of rhetoric and communication, and in computer science.

Biography
Stephen Toulmin was born in London, UK, on 25 March 1922 to Geoffrey Edelson Toulmin and Doris Holman Toulmin. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from King's College, Cambridge in 1943, where he was a Cambridge Apostle. Soon after, Toulmin was hired by the Ministry of Aircraft Production as a junior scientific officer, first at the Malvern Radar Research and Development Station and later at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Germany. At the end of World War II, he returned to England to earn a Master of Arts degree in 1947 and a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge University, subsequently publishing his dissertation as An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (1950). While at Cambridge, Toulmin came into contact with the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose examination of the relationship between the uses and the meanings of language shaped much of Toulmin's own work.

After graduating from Cambridge, he was appointed University Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at Oxford University from 1949 to 1954, during which period he wrote a second book, The Philosophy of Science: an Introduction (1953). Soon after, he was appointed to the position of Visiting Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Melbourne University in Australia from 1954 to 1955, after which he returned to England, and served as Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Leeds from 1955 to 1959. While at Leeds, he published one of his most influential books in the field of rhetoric, The Uses of Argument (1958), which investigated the flaws of traditional logic. Although it was poorly received in England and satirized as "Toulmin's anti-logic book" by Toulmin's fellow philosophers at Leeds, the book was applauded by the rhetoricians in the United States, where Toulmin served as a visiting professor at New York, Stanford, and Columbia Universities in 1959. While in the States, Wayne Brockriede and Douglas Ehninger introduced Toulmin's work to communication scholars, as they recognized that his work provided a good structural model useful for the analysis and criticism of rhetorical arguments. In 1960, Toulmin returned to London to hold the position of director of the Unit for History of Ideas of the Nuffield Foundation.

In 1965, Toulmin returned to the United States, where he held positions at various universities. In 1967, Toulmin served as literary executor for close friend N.R. Hanson, helping in the posthumous publication of several volumes. While at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Toulmin published Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972), which examines the causes and the processes of conceptual change. In this book, Toulmin uses a novel comparison between conceptual change and Charles Darwin's model of biological evolution to analyse the process of conceptual change as an evolutionary process. The book confronts major philosophical questions as well. In 1973, while a professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, he collaborated with Allan Janik, a philosophy professor at La Salle University, on the book Wittgenstein's Vienna, which advanced a thesis that underscores the significance of history to human reasoning: Contrary to philosophers who believe the absolute truth advocated in Plato's idealized formal logic, Toulmin argues that truth can be a relative quality, dependent on historical and cultural contexts (what other authors have termed "conceptual schemata").

From 1975 to 1978, he worked with the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, established by the United States Congress. During this time, he collaborated with Albert R. Jonsen to write The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1988), which demonstrates the procedures for resolving moral cases. One of his most recent works, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990), written while Toulmin held the position of the Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Northwestern University, specifically criticizes the practical use and the thinning morality underlying modern science.

Toulmin held distinguished professorships at numerous universities, including Columbia, Dartmouth College, Michigan State, Northwestern, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the University of Southern California School of International Relations.

In 1997 the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) selected Toulmin for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. His lecture, "A Dissenter's Story" (alternatively entitled "A Dissenter's Life"), discussed the roots of modernity in rationalism and humanism, the "contrast of the reasonable and the rational", and warned of the "abstractions that may still tempt us back into the dogmatism, chauvinism and sectarianism our needs have outgrown". The NEH report of the speech further quoted Toulmin on the need to "make the technical and the humanistic strands in modern thought work together more effectively than they have in the past".

On 2 March 2006 Toulmin received the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.

He was married four times, once to June Goodfield and collaborated with her on a series of books on the history of science. His children are Greg, of McLean, Va., Polly Macinnes of Skye, Scotland, Camilla Toulmin in the UK and Matthew Toulmin of Melbourne, Australia.

On 4 December 2009 Toulmin died of a heart failure at the age of 87 in Los Angeles, California.

Meta-philosophy

Objection to absolutism and relativism

Throughout many of his works, Toulmin pointed out that absolutism (represented by theoretical or analytic arguments) has limited practical value. Absolutism is derived from Plato's idealized formal logic, which advocates universal truth; accordingly, absolutists believe that moral issues can be resolved by adhering to a standard set of moral principles, regardless of context. By contrast, Toulmin contends that many of these so-called standard principles are irrelevant to real situations encountered by human beings in daily life.

To develop his contention, Toulmin introduced the concept of argument fields. In The Uses of Argument (1958), Toulmin claims that some aspects of arguments vary from field to field, and are hence called "field-dependent", while other aspects of argument are the same throughout all fields, and are hence called "field-invariant". The flaw of absolutism, Toulmin believes, lies in its unawareness of the field-dependent aspect of argument; absolutism assumes that all aspects of argument are field invariant.

In Human Understanding (1972), Toulmin suggests that anthropologists have been tempted to side with relativists because they have noticed the influence of cultural variations on rational arguments. In other words, the anthropologist or relativist overemphasizes the importance of the "field-dependent" aspect of arguments, and neglects or is unaware of the "field-invariant" elements. In order to provide solutions to the problems of absolutism and relativism, Toulmin attempts throughout his work to develop standards that are neither absolutist nor relativist for assessing the worth of ideas.

In Cosmopolis (1990), he traces philosophers' "quest for certainty" back to René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, and lauds John Dewey, Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and Richard Rorty for abandoning that tradition.

Humanizing modernity
In Cosmopolis Toulmin seeks the origins of the modern emphasis on universality (philosophers' "quest for certainty"), and criticizes both modern science and philosophers for having ignored practical issues in preference for abstract and theoretical issues. The pursuit of absolutism and theoretical arguments lacking practicality, for example, is, in his view, one of the main defects of modern philosophy. Similarly, Toulmin sensed a thinning of morality in the field of sciences, which has diverted its attention from practical issues concerning ecology to the production of the atomic bomb. To solve this problem, Toulmin advocated a return to humanism consisting of four returns: a return to oral communication and discourse, a plea which has been rejected by modern philosophers, whose scholarly focus is on the printed page; a return to the particular or individual cases that deal with practical moral issues occurring in daily life (as opposed to theoretical principles that have limited practicality); a return to the local, or to concrete cultural and historical contexts; and, finally, a return to the timely, from timeless problems to things whose rational significance depends on the time lines of our solutions. He follows up on this critique in Return to Reason (2001), where he seeks to illuminate the ills that, in his view, universalism has caused in the social sphere, discussing, among other things, the discrepancy between mainstream ethical theory and real-life ethical quandaries.

Argumentation

The Toulmin model of argument

Arguing that absolutism lacks practical value, Toulmin aimed to develop a different type of argument, called practical arguments (also known as substantial arguments). In contrast to absolutists' theoretical arguments, Toulmin's practical argument is intended to focus on the justificatory function of argumentation, as opposed to the inferential function of theoretical arguments. Whereas theoretical arguments make inferences based on a set of principles to arrive at a claim, practical arguments first find a claim of interest, and then provide justification for it. Toulmin believed that reasoning is less an activity of inference, involving the discovering of new ideas, and more a process of testing and sifting already existing ideas—an act achievable through the process of justification.

Toulmin believed that for a good argument to succeed, it needs to provide good justification for a claim. This, he believed, will ensure it stands up to criticism and earns a favourable verdict. In The Uses of Argument (1958), Toulmin proposed a layout containing six interrelated components for analyzing arguments:

Claim (Conclusion) A conclusion whose merit must be established. In argumentative essays, it may be called the thesis. For example, if a person tries to convince a listener that he is a British citizen, the claim would be "I am a British citizen" (1).

Ground (Fact, Evidence, Data) A fact one appeals to as a foundation for the claim. For example, the person introduced in 1 can support his claim with the supporting data "I was born in Bermuda" (2).

Warrant A statement authorizing movement from the ground to the claim. In order to move from the ground established in 2, "I was born in Bermuda", to the claim in 1, "I am a British citizen", the person must supply a warrant to bridge the gap between 1 and 2 with the statement "A man born in Bermuda will legally be a British citizen" (3).

Backing Credentials designed to certify the statement expressed in the warrant; backing must be introduced when the warrant itself is not convincing enough to the readers or the listeners. For example, if the listener does not deem the warrant in 3 as credible, the speaker will supply the legal provisions: "I trained as a barrister in London, specialising in citizenship, so I know that a man born in Bermuda will legally be a British citizen".

Rebuttal (Reservation) Statements recognizing the restrictions which may legitimately be applied to the claim. It is exemplified as follows: "A man born in Bermuda will legally be a British citizen, unless he has betrayed Britain and has become a spy for another country".

Qualifier Words or phrases expressing the speaker's degree of force or certainty concerning the claim. Such words or phrases include "probably", "possible", "impossible", "certainly", "presumably", "as far as the evidence goes", and "necessarily". The claim "I am definitely a British citizen" has a greater degree of force than the claim "I am a British citizen, presumably". (See also: Defeasible reasoning.)

The first three elements, claim, ground, and warrant, are considered as the essential components of practical arguments, while the second triad, qualifier, backing, and rebuttal, may not be needed in some arguments.

When Toulmin first proposed it, this layout of argumentation was based on legal arguments and intended to be used to analyze the rationality of arguments typically found in the courtroom. Toulmin did not realize that this layout could be applicable to the field of rhetoric and communication until his works were introduced to rhetoricians by Wayne Brockriede and Douglas Ehninger. Their Decision by Debate (1963) streamlined Toulmin's terminology and broadly introduced his model to the field of debate. Only after Toulmin published Introduction to Reasoning (1979) were the rhetorical applications of this layout mentioned in his works.

One criticism of the Toulmin model is that it does not fully consider the use of questions in argumentation. The Toulmin model assumes that an argument starts with a fact or claim and ends with a conclusion, but ignores an argument's underlying questions. In the example "Harry was born in Bermuda, so Harry must be a British subject", the question "Is Harry a British subject?" is ignored, which also neglects to analyze why particular questions are asked and others are not. (See Issue mapping for an example of an argument-mapping method that emphasizes questions.)

Toulmin's argument model has inspired research on, for example, goal structuring notation (GSN), widely used for developing safety cases, and argument maps and associated software.

Ethics

Good reasons approach
In Reason in Ethics (1950), his doctoral dissertation, Toulmin sets out a Good Reasons approach of ethics, and criticizes what he considers to be the subjectivism and emotivism of philosophers such as A. J. Ayer because, in his view, they fail to do justice to ethical reasoning.

The revival of casuistry
By reviving casuistry (also known as case ethics), Toulmin sought to find the middle ground between the extremes of absolutism and relativism. Casuistry was practiced widely during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to resolve moral issues. Although casuistry largely fell silent during the modern period, in The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1988), Toulmin collaborated with Albert R. Jonsen to demonstrate the effectiveness of casuistry in practical argumentation during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, effectively reviving it as a permissible method of argument.

Casuistry employs absolutist principles, called "type cases" or "paradigm cases", without resorting to absolutism. It uses the standard principles (for example, sanctity of life) as referential markers in moral arguments. An individual case is then compared and contrasted with the type case. Given an individual case that is completely identical to the type case, moral judgments can be made immediately using the standard moral principles advocated in the type case. If the individual case differs from the type case, the differences will be critically assessed in order to arrive at a rational claim.

Through the procedure of casuistry, Toulmin and Jonsen identified three problematic situations in moral reasoning: first, the type case fits the individual case only ambiguously; second, two type cases apply to the same individual case in conflicting ways; third, an unprecedented individual case occurs, which cannot be compared or contrasted to any type case. Through the use of casuistry, Toulmin demonstrated and reinforced his previous emphasis on the significance of comparison to moral arguments, a significance not addressed in theories of absolutism or relativism.

Philosophy of science

The evolutionary model

In 1972, Toulmin published Human Understanding, in which he asserts that conceptual change is an evolutionary process. In this book, Toulmin attacks Thomas Kuhn's account of conceptual change in his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn believed that conceptual change is a revolutionary process (as opposed to an evolutionary process), during which mutually exclusive paradigms compete to replace one another. Toulmin criticized the relativist elements in Kuhn's thesis, arguing that mutually exclusive paradigms provide no ground for comparison, and that Kuhn made the relativists' error of overemphasizing the "field variant" while ignoring the "field invariant" or commonality shared by all argumentation or scientific paradigms.

In contrast to Kuhn's revolutionary model, Toulmin proposed an evolutionary model of conceptual change comparable to Darwin's model of biological evolution. Toulmin states that conceptual change involves the process of innovation and selection. Innovation accounts for the appearance of conceptual variations, while selection accounts for the survival and perpetuation of the soundest conceptions. Innovation occurs when the professionals of a particular discipline come to view things differently from their predecessors; selection subjects the innovative concepts to a process of debate and inquiry in what Toulmin considers as a "forum of competitions". The soundest concepts will survive the forum of competition as replacements or revisions of the traditional conceptions.

From the absolutists' point of view, concepts are either valid or invalid regardless of contexts. From the relativists' perspective, one concept is neither better nor worse than a rival concept from a different cultural context. From Toulmin's perspective, the evaluation depends on a process of comparison, which determines whether or not one concept will improve explanatory power more than its rival concepts.

Works

An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (1950) 
The Philosophy of Science: An Introduction (1953)
The Uses of Argument (1958) 2nd edition 2003: 
Metaphysical Beliefs, Three Essays (1957) with Ronald W. Hepburn and Alasdair MacIntyre
The Riviera (1961)
Seventeenth century science and the arts (1961) 	
Foresight and Understanding: An Enquiry into the Aims of Science (1961) 
The Fabric of the Heavens (The Ancestry of Science, volume 1) (1961) with June Goodfield 
The Architecture of Matter (The Ancestry of Science, volume 2) (1962) with June Goodfield 
Night Sky at Rhodes (1963)
The Discovery of Time (The Ancestry of Science, volume 3) (1965) with June Goodfield 
Physical Reality (1970)
Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972) 
Wittgenstein's Vienna (1973) with Allan Janik
On the Nature of the Physician's Understanding (1976)
Knowing and Acting: An Invitation to Philosophy (1976) 
An Introduction to Reasoning (1979) with Allan Janik and Richard D. Rieke 2nd edition 1997: 
The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (1985) 
The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1988) with Albert R. Jonsen 
Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990) 
Social Impact of AIDS in the United States (1993) with Albert R. Jonsen
Beyond theory – changing organizations through participation (1996) with Björn Gustavsen (editors)
Return to Reason (2001)

Pantheon of skeptics
At a meeting of the executive council of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) in Denver, Colorado in April 2011, Toulmin was selected for inclusion in CSI's Pantheon of Skeptics.  The Pantheon of Skeptics was created by CSI to remember the legacy of deceased fellows of CSI and their contributions to the cause of scientific skepticism.

See also
 Argumentation theory
 Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club

Notes

References

Further reading

External links
 
 Stephen Toulmin
 Interview with Stephen Toulmin in JAC
 
 Obituary in The Guardian
 William Long (2004) Wittgenstein's Vienna (1973)

1922 births
2009 deaths
20th-century English philosophers
English rhetoricians
Philosophers of science
Moral philosophers
Wittgensteinian philosophers
Academics of the University of Leeds
Alumni of King's College, Cambridge
Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club
New York University faculty
Stanford University faculty
Columbia University faculty
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth faculty
Michigan State University faculty
University of Chicago faculty
Northwestern University faculty
University of Southern California faculty
English sceptics
Recipients of the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art
British expatriates in the United States
Harry Aubrey Toulmin Sr. (1858 – May 17, 1942) was the American lawyer located in Springfield, Ohio, who wrote the "flying machine" patent application that resulted in the patent granted to Dayton inventors Wilbur and Orville Wright on May 22, 1906.

Early life
Not much is known about Toulmin's early years.  Born in 1858 to Joshua Morton S. Toulmin (1823–1896) and Frances Hellen (1828–1916), Toulmin had four brothers and three sisters.  In 1882 at age 24, Toulmin graduated from The George Washington University Law School. For the next four years after graduating from law school, Toulmin practiced patent law in Washington, D.C.

Before the hiring

Toulmin arrived in Springfield, Ohio from Washington D.C. in 1886 because it was a center of innovation and invention that required legal representation for patent proceedings.  He set up his law firm in the Bushnell Building located at 14 East Main Street in Springfield.  In 1888, Toulmin married Rosamond Evans (d. 1947); they had two children who lived past infancy: Morton Warwick Evans and Harry Aubrey Toulmin Jr. (1890–1965).  When Harry Aubrey Toulmin Jr. joined the law firm, his father renamed the firm Toulmin & Toulmin.

The hiring
Applying for a U.S. Patent on their flying machine was never far from the Wrights' minds.  Their first attempt to get a patent on their invention failed, largely because they wrote the patent application themselves. Also contributing to its demise was their inability to demonstrate a "practical flying machine."  At that time, the U.S. Patent Office had begun to receive a flood of patent applications for aerial craft of all descriptions, real and imagined, and had adopted a policy of only approving applications for inventions involving flying machines if the benchmark of "practicality" could be met and demonstrated.  The practicality benchmark has long since been discarded by the U.S. Patent Office as being unworkable.

Following the U.S. Patent Office examiner's advice for the brothers to work with a patent attorney, Wilbur began searching for a qualified lawyer. Two friends, John Kirby and Will Ohmer, recommended that Wilbur contact Toulmin.

On January 14, 1904, Wilbur Wright wrote to Toulmin for an appointment for advice and assistance with filing a new application.  Eight days later, on January 22, Wilbur traveled to Springfield, Ohio, to see Toulmin.  Toulmin took Wilbur and Orville seriously when they came to announce that they wanted to patent a flying machine. The Wright brothers hired Toulmin that day and placed the Wright patent case in his hands.

Toulmin was confident that he could use the original application as a starting point for a broad, airtight patent that would protect the brothers' invention.  But he warned Wilbur and Orville that the process would be lengthy, and he recommended that they keep quiet about the details of their aircraft.  Based on Toulmin's direction, the Wrights decided on secrecy until their patent was secured, during which time they continued to work at building a real, practical machine.

Toulmin urged that the Wrights not seek a patent on their aircraft but only on its system for in-air control.  They followed his recommendation that they apply for a patent based on the three-axis control system of their 1902 Glider instead of their powered 1903 or 1904 Flyers in order to avoid having to present a working model to a highly doubting Patent Office.  In addition, Toulmin advised the Wrights to patent not just the mechanisms that allowed them to warp or flex a wing but, more importantly, to patent the idea of roll control itself.

Toulmin was able to interpret the Wrights' complex laboratory and field work down to their essential breakthrough.  Wilbur walked into Toulmin's office wanting to patent an airplane and walked out wanting to patent only the control system.  According to Wilbur, he and Orville immediately liked Toulmin and his services.

Orville and/or Wilbur would travel to Springfield by the interurban streetcar from Dayton to meet with Toulmin at the Patent Law Office of Toulmin & Toulmin.  After their initial meeting, Wilbur met Toulmin thirteen days later on February 4, 1904 to discuss foreign patent applications, while Orville and Charlie Taylor started constructing three new engines to replace the 1903 engine wrecked beyond repair after the end of the fourth flight of December 17, 1903 at Kitty Hawk.

On June 21, 1907, Orville journeyed to Springfield, Ohio, to consult Toulmin regarding a new patent on a device for maintaining automatic stability in an airplane. Orville made a second trip on June 26.  It is also known that on January 20, 1908 and June 15, 1908 Orville traveled to Springfield to consult Toulmin on Wright patents.

The patent

The patent application Toulmin drew up gave the Wrights sole claim to the only system ever devised for the in-air control of a fixed-wing flying machine.  By April 1904, the Wrights' patent had been filed not only in the United States but in Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy, and, Wilbur wrote, "probably Russia."  The U.S. patent issued in 1906.

Claim 1 of the patent reads: In a flying-machine, a normally flat aeroplane having lateral marginal portions capable of movement to different positions above or below [sic] the normal plane of the body of the aeroplane, such movement being about an axis traverse to the line of flight, whereby said lateral marginal portions may be moved to different angles relative to the normal plane of the body of the aeroplane so as to present to the atmosphere different angles of incidence, and means for so moving said lateral marginal portions, substantially described.

On deciphering the patent legalese, it becomes apparent that Toulmin did not patent the airplane.  Rather, Toulmin patented airplane (flying-machine) wing edges (lateral marginal portions) that normally are flat but may move up and down in a direction that is different from the airplane's line of flight and may be moved to different angles.  Although the patent particularly addressed a solid wing with a portion of the wing (the marginal portions) being flexed (warped) to provide lift, the patent claim was not so limiting.  In particular, Toulmin's genius as a patent attorney predicated and helped the Wright Brothers patent slats, the spoiler, the aileron, the flaps, the elevator, and the Rudder for an airplane (see picture above).  Without these, an airplane cannot be controlled any more than a car can be controlled without movable wheels.  Without a license to the Wright brothers' patent, it was not legally possible to build or fly a controllable airplane in the early 20th century.  Unsurprisingly, the verbal and legal attacks by competitors on the Wright Brothers began almost immediately.

After the patent
Patent litigation was a costly endeavor.  In a January 22, 1910 letter to Wilbur, Toulmin suggested that the most economical way for the Wright brothers to proceed would be to enter into a retainer agreement with Toulmin & Toulmin, paying US$12,000 (about US$132,000 in 2006 inflation-adjusted dollars) for the first two years and US$10,000 per year (US$110,000 inflation adjusted to 2006) for the subsequent five.  This would permit Toulmin to devote his full attention to the Wright brothers litigation, he suggested.  Even though the amounts requested were reasonable, it took the Wright brothers only two days to reject that proposal.  It may have been money that ended the relationship between Toulmin and the Wright brothers.

In April 1910, Toulmin issued a statement saying that attacks on the Wright brothers was wholly unjustified.

By 1911 Toulmin's prized clients were operating the world's first aircraft factory and the world's first flight-training school while fighting an armful of patent-infringement suits.

On February 13 and 15, 1911, William Joseph Hammer, consulting engineer, and James W. See, mechanical engineer, gave depositions that were taken at the office of H. A. Toulmin, Dayton, Ohio.

On January 9–10, 1912. Wilbur and Orville give depositions in Dayton in Erastus E. Winkley v. Orville & Wilbur Wright lawsuit.  Testimony was given on the conception of their patent no. 1,075,533, filed by Toulmin on February 10, 1908.  Several drawings used for their patent application and correspondence with Katharine Wright and Harry A. Toulmin regarding it are introduced into the record.

Later in life
Toulmin handled five patent applications for the Wright brothers over a period of 17 years, spurring more than 13 years of fierce legal battles over the intellectual property rights he helped to create.  As a result of Toulmin's success in keeping others from using the Wright brothers' ideas, aircraft manufacturers established the Aircraft Manufacturers Association to coordinate the World War I wartime aircraft manufacturing in the United States and formed a patent pool four months after the United States joined the war, in July, 1917, with the approval of the U.S. government. All patent litigation ceased automatically and royalties were reduced to one percent and free exchange of inventions and ideas took place among all the airframe builders.  Toulmin channeled his success and notoriety into authoring more than 30 books on a wide variety of topics, including the Truman Committee of President Harry S. Truman.  Several of Toulmin's books were published well after his death in 1942.

History's view

Toulmin was a pioneer patent lawyer who assisted the Wright brothers in the creation of the age of flight.  In honor of the patent's centennial anniversary and the 101st anniversary of the last flight of the 1905 Wright Flyer, commemorative groups in Dayton and Springfield, Ohio on  October 5, 2006, distributed a commemorative booklet (see above images) and unveiled the Harry A. Toulmin Sr. Memorial Sculpture on downtown Springfield's Fountain Square, across from the restored Bushnell Building where Toulmin maintained his office.  The 8-foot (2.4 m) sculpture, a bronze work by artist Michael Major, received a ceremonial flyover by a replica of the 1911 Wright model B. The Bushnell Building is recognized as part of Ohio's National Road Scenic Byway for its being the place where Toulmin helped the Wrights acquire patents for their flying machine. The Harry Toulmin Room in the Bushnell Building seats 50 people.

The collection of Wilbur's and Orville Wright's papers in the Library of Congress includes significant correspondence with the Wrights' lawyers concerning their business affairs, including Toulmin, as well as lawyers Frederick P. Fish, H. Springmann, and Pliny W. Williamson.

Legacy
Despite his death in 1942, the legacy of Harry Toulmin Sr. affected those around him through the 1990s.

In 1852, Toulmin's father-in-law, Warwick Evans, was the first medical school graduate from Georgetown University Medical Center.  Evans went on to become an anatomy professor and prominent physician.

In 1888, Toulmin Sr. married Rosamond Evans (d. 1947); they had two children: Morton Warwick Evans and Harry Aubrey Toulmin Jr. (1890–1965). Toulmin Jr. graduated from Wittenberg University in Ohio and the University of Virginia School of Law.  Following in his father's footsteps, Toulmin Jr. became a patent attorney and joined his father's law firm, renamed Toulmin & Toulmin.  To distinguish the two, Toulmin Sr. was known by family and close friends as Aubrey "Aircraft" and Toulmin Jr. was known as "Lawyer" Harry.  There are no living descendants of Harry Aubrey Toulmin Sr. 

Eventually, the Toulmin & Toulmin law firm moved to the Schwind Building, in Dayton, Ohio (a building which played a role in the Dayton Woman's Suffrage Association and subsequently became the Moraine Embassy Apartments).  Among Toulmin & Toulmin's clients was the Tucker Corporation, and the firm name appears on the design patent covering Preston Tucker's design for the Tucker Sedan.

Like many patent attorneys, Toulmin Jr. eventually began working as an in-house lawyer for a corporation.  In April 1947, Toulmin Jr. was elected the chairman of the board of the Tucker Corporation.  Five months later, on September 26, 1947, Harry A. Toulmin Jr. resigned as chairman of the board from the Tucker Corporation in a letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).  This letter contributed to the SEC investigation of Preston Tucker and the demise of the Tucker Corporation.

Harry Jr. was a prolific inventor. Over 200 patents in a wide field of technologies were issued to him. Toulmin Jr. went on to form Central Pharmaceuticals Inc.

At the time of his death in 1965, Toulmin Jr. left his shares in his company, Central Pharmaceuticals Inc., worth $1 million at the time, in a trust fund to be managed by his widow, Virginia B. Toulmin.  By the terms of the trust, the balance at the time of Virginia's death was to be transferred to Georgetown University Medical Center in honor of Harry Toulmin Jr.'s grandfather Warwick Evans.  Georgetown University is the rival school of George Washington University, the school where Harry Toulmin Sr. received his law degree.

Mrs. Toulmin took control of Central Pharmaceuticals as president and built Central into a thriving drug manufacturer.  In 1995, Mrs. Toulmin sold Central Pharmaceuticals for $178 million to the German pharmaceutical giant Schwarz Pharma.

The Toulmin trusts were the subject of substantial legal problems.  Both Toulmin Sr. and Toulmin Jr. had testamentary trusts, and some of the $178 million was shared between the two trusts.  Toulmin Jr.'s first wife, Margaret McCarty, was a life beneficiary under Toulmin Sr.'s trust, where the remainder after Toulmin Jr.'s first wife death was to be allotted to the living descendants of Toulmin Sr.'s grandfather. After the death of Margaret McCarty on September 29, 1994, the Toulmin Sr. remainder trust money had grown to a considerable sum.  Since the Toulmin Sr. remainder trust money was to revert under Toulmin Sr.'s will to descendants of his grandfather per stirpes, it became necessary for the executors of Harry Aubrey Toulmin Sr. to trace the living descendants of Toulmin Sr.'s grandfather, Theophilus Lindsey Toulmin (1820?–1895?). On April 21, 1996, eighty-two senior representatives of every surviving branch of Theophilus Lindsey Toulmin received a letter addressing the trust and their potential inheritance from Toulmin Sr.

By 1997, Virginia had reached the age of 72 and the Georgetown University trust fund grew to $62 million.  At that time, the donation was the biggest to a Washington-area university and the 17th largest private gift to U.S. higher education.  The largest previous private gift to the school was $17 million, which was donated anonymously in 1996.

Virginia died in 2010.

Works

Published books
 Social historians, by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1911)
 Bothering business, by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1925)
 Trade-mark profits and protection, by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1926)
 Air service, American expeditionary force, 1918, by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1927)
 Millions in mergers by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1929)
 Executives' business law, by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1931)
 Graphic course of patentable inventions, by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1935)
 With Pershing in Mexico, by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1935)
 Digest of federal laws pertaining to fair competition in industry,: With chart of government departments, bureaus and commissions in charge of the administration of these laws, by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1937)
 Inventions and patents, (The Ohio state university. Research foundation lectures 1st) (The Ohio state university. Research foundation lectures 1st) by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1937)
 Trade agreements and the anti-trust laws: Including forms and an analysis of the Robinson-Patman Act by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1937)
 The Truman Committee of President Harry S. Truman by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1937)
 The importance of invention to the nation, by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1938)
 The law of foods, drugs and cosmetics by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1942)
 The law of foods, drugs and cosmetics: 1945 pocket supplement by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1945)
 The Trade-mark act of 1946,: Analyzed, annotated and explained by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1946)
 Trade agreements and the anti-trust laws: Supplement. 1946– by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1946)
 Diary of democracy;: The Senate War Investigating Committee by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1947)
 International contracts and the anti-trust laws: With typical forms of agreements, indictments, complaints, and decrees by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1947)
 How to keep invention records, together with an explanation of the nature of industrial property by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1948)
 A treatise on the anti-trust laws of the United States: And including all related trade regulatory laws by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1949)
 Patents and the anti-trust laws of the United States,: Including trade-marks and copyrights by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1950)
 "Antitrust laws of the United States" and leading antitrust cases of 1954 by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1955)
 Trade-mark handbook by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1957)
 A treatise on the law of foods, drugs, and cosmetics by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1958)
 Patent law for the executive and engineer by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1958)
 Making mergers pay (American Management Association. General management series) (American Management Association. General management series) by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1967)
 A treatise on the law of foods, drugs and cosmetics: 1969 supplement,(combined supplement to volumes 1,2,3 and 4, 2d ed.) by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1969)
 The city manager;: A new profession (Metropolitan America) by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1974)
 Light duty vehicle driveability investigation by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1978)
 Handbook of patents by Harry Aubrey Toulmin (1980)

References

External links
  compiled by Bruce Calvert-Toulmin. Toulmin Sr. is identified by number 13311643 and Bruce Calvert-Toulmin is identified by number 13215A2822, making Toulmin Sr. the great uncle(?) of Bruce Calvert-Toulmin.

American lawyers
Patent attorneys
1858 births
1942 deaths
People from Springfield, Ohio
Wright brothers
George Washington University Law School alumni The unseen species problem is commonly referred to in ecology and deals with the estimation of the number of species represented in an ecosystem that were not observed by samples. It more specifically relates to how many new species would be discovered if more samples were taken in an ecosystem. The study of the unseen species problem was started in the early 1940s by Alexander Steven Corbet. He spent 2 years in British Malaya trapping butterflies and was curious how many new species he would discover if he spent another 2 years trapping. Many different estimation methods have been developed to determine how many new species would be discovered given more samples. The unseen species problem also applies more broadly, as the estimators can be used to estimate any new elements of a set not previously found in samples. An example of this is determining how many words William Shakespeare knew based on all of his written works. The unseen species problem can be broken down mathematically as follows:

If  independent samples are taken, , and then if  more independent samples were taken, the number of unseen species that will be discovered by the additional samples is given by with  being the second set of  samples.

History
In the early 1940s Alexander Steven Corbet spent 2 years in British Malaya trapping butterflies. He kept track of how many species he observed, and how many members of each species were captured. For example, he captured only 2 members of 74 different species. When he returned to the United Kingdom, he approached statistician Ronald Fisher, and asked how many new species of butterflies he could expect to catch if he went trapping for another two years. In essence, Corbet was asking how many species he observed zero times. Fisher responded with a simple estimation: for an additional 2 years of trapping, Corbet could expect to capture 75 new species. He did this using a simple summation (data provided by Orlitsky in Table 1 below in the Example section):Here,  corresponds to the number of individual species which were observed  times. Fisher's sum was later confirmed by Good–Toulmin.

Estimators 
To estimate the number of unseen species, let  be number of future samples () divided by the number of past samples (), or . Let  be the number of individual species observed  times (for example, if there were 74 species of butterflies with 2 observed members throughout the  samples, then ).

The Good–Toulmin estimator 
The Good–Toulmin estimator was developed by I. J. Good and G. H. Toulmin in 1953. The estimate of the unseen species based on the Good–Toulmin estimator is given byThe Good–Toulmin Estimator has been shown to be a good estimate for values of . The Good–Toulmin estimator also approximates that This means that  estimates  to within  as long as .  However, for , the Good–Toulmin estimator fails to capture accurate results. This is because, if ,  increases by  for  with , meaning that if ,  grows super-linearly in , but  can grow at most linearly with . Therefore, when ,  grows faster than  and does not approximate the true value.

To compensate for this, Efron and Thisted showed that a truncated Euler transform can also be a usable estimate: with  and  where  is the location chosen to truncate the Euler transform.

The smoothed Good–Toulmin estimator 
Similar to the approach by Efron and Thisted, Alon Orlitsky, Ananda Theertha Suresh, and Yihong Wu developed the smooth Good–Toulmin estimator. They realized that the Good–Toulmin estimator failed for  because of the exponential growth, and not its bias. Therefore, they estimated the number of unseen species by truncating the series. Orlitsky, Suresh, and Wu also noted that for distributions with , the driving term in the summation estimate is the  term, regardless of which value of  is chosen. To solve this, they selected a random nonnegative integer , truncated the series at , and then took the average over a distribution about . The resulting estimator is. This method was chosen because the bias of  shifts signs due to the  coefficient. Averaging over a distribution of  therefore reduces the bias. This means that the estimator can be written as the linear combination of the prevalence: Depending on the distribution of  chosen, the results will vary. With this method, estimates can be made for , and this is the best possible.

Species discovery curve 
The species discovery curve can also be used. This curve relates the number of species found in an area as a function of the time. These curves can also be created by using estimators (such as the Good–Toulmin estimator) and plotting the number of unseen species at each value for .

A species discovery curve is always increasing, as there is never a sample that could decrease the number of discovered species. Furthermore, the species discovery curve is also decelerating; the more samples taken, the fewer unseen species are expected to be discovered. The species discovery curve will also never asymptote, as it is assumed that although the discovery rate might become infinitely slow, it will never actually stop. Two common models for a species discovery curve are the logarithmic and the exponential function.

Example – Corbet's butterflies 
As an example, consider the data Corbet provided Fisher in the 1940s. Using the Good–Toulmin model, the number of unseen species is found using. This can then be used to create a relationship between  and .

This relationship is shown in the plot below.
From the plot, it is seen that at , which was the value of  that Corbet brought to Fisher, the resulting estimate of  is 75, matching what Fisher found. This plot also acts as a species discovery curve for this ecosystem, and defines how many new species will be discovered as  increases (and more samples are taken).

Other uses 
There are numerous uses for the predictive algorithm. Knowing that the estimators are accurate, it allows scientists to extrapolate accurately the results of polling people by a factor of 2. They can predict the number of unique answers based on the number of people that have answered similarly. The method can also be used to determine the extent of someone's knowledge. A prime example is determining how many unique words Shakespeare knew based on the written works we have today.

Example – How many words did Shakespeare know? 
Based on research done by Thisted and Efron, of Shakespeare's known works, there are 884,647 total words. The research also found that there are at total of  different words that appear more than 100 times. Therefore, the total number of unique words was found to be 31,534. Applying the Good–Toulmin model, if an equal number of works by Shakespeare were discovered, then it is estimated that  unique words would be found. The goal would be to derive  for . Thisted and Efron estimate that , meaning that Shakespeare most likely knew over twice as many words as he actually used in all of his writings.

See also 

 Species discovery curve
 Alexander Steven Corbet
 Ronald Fisher
 German tank problem

References 

Ecology
Biostatistics